Life Isn't a Fairy Tale?
by Ejays17
Summary: Who said Life can't be a Fairy Tale? Luna has her own ideas about that.


**Life Isn't a Fairy Tale?**

_Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, or Hermione or Luna – they belongs to JK Rowling & a couple of publishing companies. I only own an evil Plot Bunny called Bronwen._

Hermione re-settled her overloaded bookbag on her should as she entered the Library. As always, the musty smell of old paper soothed her, and she smiled in anticipation of the hours of uninterrupted studying she had in front of her.

She walked purposefully to the desk at the back of the room which had been tacitly marked as "hers" since the beginning of First Year. Originally chosen because it was far away from the entrance and the commonly-used reference area, she had fallen in love with it because of the artwork some long-forgotten student had decorated the wall with.

Cleverly using the cracks in the plaster as a guide, the artist had created a rose-bower around the window, and disappearing into the shelves on either side. The first time Hermione had seen it, it had reminded her of the garden at home, and it had helped her through the first unhappy weeks at Hogwarts. Unusually for a picture in the Wizarding World, the plants did not move when you looked at them, but Hermione was sure that they changed while she wasn't there. Once, in a fit of idleness, she had counted the flowers and buds, and had come up with three different answers. It did annoy her slightly at first that she couldn't keep a track of them, but each time she counted them she arrived at a different amount, and now she accepted it as part of the "magic" of the painting.

So it was with a small amount of surprise when she came around the corner of the bookshelf and saw Luna sitting at her desk. Luna had obviously been there for a while; the desk was covered with wads of screwed-up parchment and there were four or five large books piled haphazardly on one corner. In front of her was something that looked like a child's spinning top, which she was poking with her wand and frowning slightly.

"Hi Luna," Hermione said, taking possession of half the desk by the simple method of pushing the mess Luna had made into one corner and piling her books in the cleared space.

"Hello Hermione," Luna answered vaguely. "I hope you don't mind me borrowing your desk, but there aren't any roses in the common-room and I need roses for this spell."

"Oh, that's fine Luna. The roses always help me concentrate, I always seem to get twice as much done here than I do in the common-room," Hermione agreed, determined to be polite to Luna no matter what she said.

"That's because of the Feathered Tranvaions," Luna said airily. "They live in the just-opened flowers and are very, very smart. So smart that it makes the people around them smarter by association."

Hermione had become used to Luna's quirky beliefs in the time they had been friendly, so she merely smiled and started writing, instead of trying to convince Luna that there was no such thing as a Feather Whatever-it-was, as she would have done a year ago.

Silence reigned for the next twenty minutes or so. Hermione had nearly forgotten that she was sharing the desk when a thump from the other side startled her out of her work. She looked up to see Luna starting the top spinning again and dabbing the point of it with her forefinger. This didn't seem to have any effect at all, to Hermione's eyes, and she watched in fascination as the top fell over with a thump. Luna prodded it with her wand again, and then opened her notebook and crossed out a page.

"This one doesn't work at all. I know I did all the parts correctly, and I can't see any reason _why_ it doesn't work. I've done the incantation, spun the spindle, pricked my fingers, and the roses are all here. Unless the roses aren't supposed to be so big at this point. But I don't know how I'm supposed to get the roses to grow if I'm asleep. There's has to be a fault in the instructions, it's the only explanation," Luna muttered to herself,

Hermione couldn't contain her curiosity any longer. "Luna, what are you _doing_?"

Luna looked up from her work. "Daddy asked me to check some spells for the next edition of the _Quibbler_. He doesn't like to publish anything unless he's checked it first, and these spells are meant for a young lady, so he asked me to make sure they work. I'm a bit pleased that this one didn't work – falling asleep for a hundred years would be a bit of a nuisance, don't you think?" she said matter-of-factly. "And what would happen if my true love didn't find me at the end? Would I keep sleeping forever, or would I just wake up anyway? And I might not even like the person who woke me up, and I would be stuck with him forever." She looked back at her notebook. "I wonder if I could substitute a toad for a frog for this one?" she mused. "Do you think Neville will lend me Trevor if I asked him?"

"Why did you think my desk would be a good place for your experiments? Wouldn't it have been easier to use one of the empty classrooms? I'm sure Professor Flitwick would let you use the Charms room after classes," Hermione asked, trying not to think of what Luna would want with Trevor the Toad.

"I did try an experiment there, but I couldn't work out how to make my hair strong enough for someone to climb up. It hurts enough when I have knots to brush out, could you imagine how much more it would hurt if someone was pulling on it all the way up? Anyway, my dormitory isn't at the top of the tower, so it wouldn't have worked. And slippers made of glass aren't very safe things to walk in. I broke three pairs before Madam Pomfrey made me stop."

A spindle, roses, glass slippers, a toad who should be a frog. The pieces fell into place, and Hermione suppressed a desire to laugh. It was so very Luna-like to try to quantify the magic in Muggle fairy-tales. She didn't seem to realise that they were only stories made up to entertain children going to sleep at night, not a guide to Happily-Ever-After.

"Luna, they're only stories. They don't mean anything. You won't be able to make things work in real life like they do in the stories," Hermione stated.

Luna raised her luminous eyes to Hermione's, a faint smile on her face. "But they do happen, if only you can get the formula right. It happened to you, right here. You sat here, surrounded by your castle of roses, waiting for your Knight to win his way through and wake you with a kiss. Which he did, and you have a Happily-Ever-After. And Ginny will too, even though she has red hair."

Hermione blinked in surprise. Luna came out with the most unsettling observations at times. She had never thought that she was like Sleeping Beauty – she wasn't beautiful to start with – but could see the parallels now that they had been pointed out to her. She had surrounded herself, not with a castle of enchanted roses, but with her schoolwork, and rule keeping, and helping Harry, and it had taken someone very determined and patient to break through the wall. And now she and Ron were living in their version of Happily-Ever-After.

"What story is Ginny, if it matters that she has red hair?" Hermione was curious, she couldn't think of any fairy-tale that fitted Ginny at all.

"Oh, it doesn't matter that she has red hair, but it's generally a golden colour in the story," Luna answered readily. "You see, Michael Corner was too horrid, Dean Thomas was too nice, but Harry is just right."


End file.
